Her Most Prized Possession

My mom has a lavish Snow Village that literally encompasses their entire dining room. It takes her and my dad two full days to set everything up - it has dozens of homes, businesses, lights, a train that goes through a mountain, roads, trees, snow, automobiles, people, an ice rink with skaters, sledders, a singing choir, and a lurking Santa that she hides each year for us to find. It has taken her years to acquire all these pieces and it brings her great joy to have it on display each year.


BUT....


That is not her most prized possession that is on display at Christmas.


This is:





Oh yes, this nativity scene has two contributors: my brother Aaron and myself. We both had the same 3rd grade teacher and this was the Christmas art project. My mom combined our two scenes to make one and has been setting this up every Christmas for the past 20 + years.


Well, as you can see from the evidence above, neither of us are artistic - AT ALL. I used to cry when we had art time in class because I was a perfectionist, but not artistically gifted, so it was torture for me. Aaron, as an adult, doesn't even want to play Pictionary and tries to wad up his drawings so we won't laugh at him.


So let's get to the analysis of who did what:

Hint: to enlarge, click on pic (please, you gotta get a close up of ole greenie there on the right)



This would be Aaron's depiction of Mary & Joseph...a little something we like to call "Have Yourself a Chernobyl Christmas." He actually poked a pencil in their faces to make the eyes which gives them that scary, hollowed out look. I will give him props though on the snazzy pin-stripe look. And since his Mary and Joseph were...let's just say rather ambiguous, my mom reclassified them as the shepherds.




And here are my versions of Mary and Joseph, albeit non-shalacked and rather like dough people. I just noticed that my Joseph looks like a creepy flasher guy due to the way I "designed" his cloak. And Mary...what can I say? Her face is a mess. Can you imagine how much pressure I was under? I mean, we didn't even have small, fine bristled paint brushes to work on the facial features. One wrong swoop with the one size fits all paintbrush and the face is ruined - why didn't I think of using a pencil?

Now I will have to give credit to Aaron for the baby Jesus. You can't tell much from the picture but he did a nice job. There is an obvious face on a head and the appearance of a swaddling going on while lying in a manger. Since for some reason the shalacking part was non-existent the year I made my scene, my baby Jesus was nothing more than a rolled up ball of dough. And then I went and painted it bright yellow...and my family called it Big Bird's Egg. No face, no distinguishing characteristics, just the classic: take the playdough and roll it back and forth on the table until it forms a ball. And then I mashed it out some to make it more oval like - OK, fine - more egg like. I took great offense to the mocking of my baby Jesus hence the reason Aaron's is the one on display.

I remember when we were younger that we would beg my mother not to display our Nativity Scene. And each year, she would tell us: "But I love it because you made it." And after stashing Wy's "art projects" from the past year, I totally get that. I must have 14 versions of some kind of project involving his hand print. And I can't bear to part with any of them. So thanks Mom for not listening to our whining and complaining over the years and for displaying our unique, one of a kind Nativity Scene.

P.S. The sheep and the cow were compliments of our crib mobile that we had when we were babies.

P.S.S. Not sure why Matt doesn't have one of these - he was probably smart enough not to bring it home in the first place.